Frank sinatra

February in New York: where dreams come to die

I probably sound naive, but February always struck me as a month that should be full of hope – brimming with the type of optimism that comes from new beginnings. At least here in New York, though, it was grim. Everything feels more expensive. Everyone’s temper seems as short as the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them daylight hours. And then there’s the weather. The streets are flanked like an Arctic military checkpoint by car-sized mounds of calcified brown snow. The kind of snow that has visible layers, like a geological cross-section of urban neglect. The kind that has already gobbled up who knows how many small dogs. The wind is so ferocious, it makes that chemical skin peel you’ve been targeted for on Instagram look pleasant. New York does sleep. And thank goodness it does.

The late Quincy Jones, a man of many talents

The death of Quincy Jones, at the considerable age of ninety-one, represents not just the passing of a great American musical icon, but the departure of a truly remarkable man from the stage. The winner of an astounding twenty-eight Grammy awards, he excelled in so many different areas of music — from record production and film soundtrack composition to big band jazz and multi-instrumental playing — that it would not have been particularly surprising to discover that he had written operas or symphonies on his days off.

quincy jones

There is a little bit of Frank Sinatra in Donald Trump

Unless you are drinking from the cistern that Bill Kristol and his herd top off daily, you will have been impressed by Donald Trump’s long press conference yesterday at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey. Kristol’s latest puddles include the charge that Trump and Elon Musk are “mediocre” (“two repulsive and mediocre oligarchs”), a comment that elicited more snickers than your local candy shop stocks.   It turns out that, like the House of the Lord, Donald Trump is a house with many mansions. You go to his rallies, and he is in rah-rah-cheerleading mode. He works the crowd. The enthusiasm among the tens of thousands of people is palpable. He is a master of off-the-cuff paratactic delivery and what the rhetoricians call aposiopesis.

trump

The Christmas carol canon that could have been

Ah, Christmastime, the season for pheasant dinners, fancy ties, the land of Toyland from which you can never return, the time of year when everyone falls in love, when snowmen fly away to Snowland to become Eskimos, and when kids run around crying “dickory dock!” Right? All of these are bits and pieces from old Christmas songs that have mostly been forgotten, whose imagery and language failed to take hold in the general imagination. It’s quite fascinating how such a small number of songs, from a very narrow moment in American life, have contributed so heavily to defining the mood and feel of our secular Christmases.